Text by Michel Ragon(from “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie,” published by and copyright Editions Albin Michel, 2008)Translation by Paul Ben-Itzak

As the exhibition “Félix Fénéon: Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse,” migrates across the Atlantic from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York — with a tweaked title for the Spring show that emphasizes the critic, editor, and modern art promoter’s status among French anarchists — we thought we’d commemorate the occasion with (justement) Michel Ragon’s sketch, as featured in “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie,” published and copyright Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 2008: (To read our previous coverage of this transatlantic extravaganza — and see more art — start here, then follow the additional links at the end of that article. Click here to read more from Michel Ragon on Anarcho-Syndicalisme, in translation, and here to read translated excerpts from Monsieur Ragon’s “Trompe-l’Oeil.”)

Fénéon, Félix (1861 – 1944): Anarchist intellectual, dandy, eminent critic of the art of Neo-Impressionism (Seurat, Signac, Lautrec), employee (highly-regarded) of the War Ministry, Félix Fénéon was also an important anti-militarist, suspected of posing a bomb at the Foyot restaurant. Incarcerated [in 1894] during the ‘Trial of 30,’ judged, and acquitted (Mallarmé testified in his favor), he directed [the anarchist artistic journal] L’En Dehors until 1895.

His short stories in three lines for Matin (1905-1906) are miniature masterpieces. He paraded alcoholic clergymen and syphilitic soldiers and denounced universal suffrage and the right to vote.

In January 1893, in a period when the winter was particularly severe, he wrote, “The moment is propitious for the extinction of pauperism. In a few days, if the frigorific acceleration progresses, the dying-of-hunger race will have completely disappeared.”

He liked to say that the Fatherland is “an entity entirely empty and hollow, like God, like Society, like the State, like Nature, like Morality, etcetera.”

Art critic at Père Peinard, he adopted the tone of [Emile] Pouget [the journal’s publisher, a labor militant and comrade of Paris Communard Louise Michel]: “And merde to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, it’s just a run-down jalopy that needs a good kick in the ass like all the academies, all the institutes and the other bureaucratic machines of the precious pigsty of governance. Therefore no jury, for the independent artists. That’s good that, my God.”

Jean Paulhan, in his preface to Fénéon’s works, wrote: “The anarchist attacks had their reasons, good or not; it’s not for me to judge. Societies have their defects; it seems that French society of the post-War period was particularly ignoble and lack-luster at the same time: detestable and as if disgusted with itself. Even if their only ambition was to provoke precise, explainable, and intelligent crimes, this is enough for the anarchists to warrant our sympathy.”

Text from the August 7, 1911 issue of L’intransigent, as reproduced in “Chroniques d’art, 1902-1918,” Published by and copyright Gallimard, 1960, with texts assembled and annotated by L.C. Breunig. Art from — and courtesy — Artcurial’s September 24 auction of Ancient and 19th century art in Paris (for the Delacroix), the exhibition Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse, opening October 16 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it runs through January 27 before migrating to the Museum of Modern Art (for the Rysselberghe, Seurat, Cross, and Signac) and the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager’s archived coverage of the 2012 exhibition “Maximilien Luce, de l’esquisse (draft) au chef-d’oeuvre,” at the Musée de l’Hotel-Dieu in Mantes la Jolie (for the Luce).

“The academic painter Delacroix.”

— Art History course description, Bard College, 2019

An updated edition of Paul Signac’s rare booklet, previously issued in a very limited edition by La Revue Blanche, has just been published.

“From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” is the title of this brief work which Paul Signac has dedicated to the memory of his companion, the great painter Georges Seurat.

Seurat has still not received the recognition he deserves. Beyond the merits of the innovations which they brought to art thanks to the application, which he was the first to practice, of Neo-Impressionist theories, his works have, in their drawing, their composition, the very discretion of their luminosities a style which sets them apart and maybe even above the work of the majority of painters, his contemporaries.

No painter makes me think of Moliere as does Seurat, the Moliere of “The Bourgeoisie Gentleman,” a ballet full of grace, of lyricism and of good sense.

The Neo-Impressionist painters, of whom Paul Signac is the most gifted and the most famous, are those who, to cite our author, “founded, and, since 1886, have developed the technique referred to as ‘divisionism,’ which utilizes as a means of expression the optical mix of tones and tints.” This technique can be traced to the art of the Byzantine mosaicists, and I even recall a day on which Signac, in a letter to Charles Morice, evoked the Libreria de Siene.

But we don’t need to look back that far.

In his book, Signac abundantly demonstrates how this luminous technique, which brought a sense of order to the Impressionist innovations, was foretold, even applied, by Delacroix, to whom it had been revealed by an examination of the paintings of Constable.

Signac scrutinizes even more closely the impact of the Impressionists and of their precursor Jongkind.

Then he gets to Seurat who, in 1886, exposed the first divisionist painting, “A Sunday afternoon on the Grande-Jatte Isle.”

Pointilism was thus born and went on to produce magnificent works which nobody dared ridicule. Today painting seems to be following a path directly opposed to that which the Neo-Impressionists took. Delacroix’s two celebrated slogans, “Grey is the enemy of every painting!” and “Banish all Earthen colors” would mystify the young painters who want to return to the basics of forms and drawing, just as before them there was a return to the essentials of composition, light, and color intensity.

Au contraire, the new painters paint in hard to reproduce grey tones and search out the elegance of Earthen colors.

It has furnished modern art with a number of very beautiful and very luminous works, those of Seurat, of Henri-Edmond Cross, of Luce, of Van Rysselberghe, etc., which are rightly admired today and which the future will remember.

Paul Signac’s little booklet marks an important date in the history of contemporary art.